Manipulating Piezoelectric Phononic Crystals to Create Phononic Devices

Phononic crystals are periodic metamaterials that interact with elastic waves due to their structure which can be useful for a variety of devices. A soft phononic crystal will buckle under compression, changing its phononic properties and therefore device behavior. This system can be used to make devices with multiple states for sensing applications, or devices that can be tuned to their specific use. To date, much of the research on soft phononic crystals explores externally applied tractions that change the entire structure of the crystal. We propose a soft piezoelectric phononic crystal that can be manipulated in a more targeted fashion with electric fields, which could allow a single phononic crystal to act as different devices depending on the applied electric field.

We investigated this idea by simulating a soft piezoelectric phononic crystal in two dimensions. We explored the modeling of a piezoelectric material undergoing large, nonlinear deformations in a quasi-two-dimensional system. The simulations examined the use of electric fields to generate basic device structures such as resonators and waveguides as well as the phononic behavior of those structures. We also explored combining these structures to form simple devices that can be created, altered, or removed as desired with the applied electric field.

This work was supported by NSF grants DMR-1752100, DMR-2011750, and CMMI-2037097.